Here’s a quick tip for Excel junkies. If you are using workbooks with many sheets, or where tab names are long, it can take a fair bit of scrolling around at the bottom of the Excel window.
If you right-click on the navigation buttons shown to the left of the tabs/sheets, Excel will throw up a list of all the sheets, and you can jump to the appropriate one with a single click.
Here’s a particularly large sales spreadsheet, for one:
Many Microsoft folks have experienced the joys of scheduling Live Meetings with customers and partners, where they get an email or meeting request with lots of links, asking them to install software on their PC before they try to join the meeting. How often do the attendees not manage to click the right link, or fail to install the software beforehand, or even when they do, join the Live Meeting and can’t hear audio, or see slides?
Well, thanks to Microsoft UK’s irrepressible John Noakes and courtesy of Office 2010, here’s an easy alternative…
We would like to start using our Office 2010 technology in these meetings now by using PowerPoint Broadcast – a great feature of PPT 2010…
With this technology, all you need to set up is the voice conf call (arranged via simple Outlook addin, using Office Communication Server or Lync Server). See here for Microsoft IT’s own case study on using UC technology to save money and increase flexibility…
Once we have the customer on the line we can then broadcast our PPT deck direct to the customer over the web by starting PowerPoint Broadcast on our client. This then generates a simple URL that we email or IM to the customer.
All they have to do then is click on the URL and……… hey presto……….they see the slides and they hear the audio via Communicator!
If you want to try it for yourself, open PowerPoint, go to the Slideshow menu and look for Broadcast Slide Show
From the dialog which appears next, choose “Change Broadcast Service” and set it to Powerpoint Broadcast Service. Sign in with your Windows Live ID, and your URL is generated……… copy, paste, email/IM to recipient. And we’re off. SIMPLE.
Even the best of us make common typos – “teh” instead of “the”, “Exchnage” instead of Exchange etc. Microsoft Word’s Autocorrect feature has mopped up a lot of the common ones – have a look if you’re interested, from the File Menu/BackStage in Word 2010, under Options…
The same options can be accessed in Outlook 2010 from the File Menu / Options / Mail / Spelling & Autocorrect… though if you add something to the auto-correct list in Outlook, it isn’t immediately available in Word.
There are some quite cool little tricks you can type in an email or in a Word doc, to make the content look better or to make it easier for the recipient/reader to consume, and these fall into AutoCorrect although they’re more like mini-macros.
A few examples…
Some time ago, I wrote on OCS custom status fields and how to implement them…
Well, security changes in the way Office Communicator works mean that, by default, the client needs to download its configuration file from a secure location. This has caused a problem for a good many people who used to rely on the status file being on their hard disk.
If you don’t have access to a web site that can publish a file via SSL, then I’ve posted a few other samples here… thanks to Matt McSpirit for the tip on how to do it 🙂 I struggled for a while by using SkyDrive to do it, but the eventual URL kept changing – now I can host a bunch of these files on the blog server!
Applying the settings
Here is the Registry file which will configure Communicator to use the “Microsoft UK” custom status below. If you’re happy with that, just
If you’d rather use a different set of statuses, try downloading the registry file and save it somewhere, drag/drop it it into a new, blank Notepad window, and replace the URL with one of the following ones… then save it, and apply the settings as above.
Following on somewhat from my off-topic Walking in the Country post, I thought I’d recount one useful tip that helps in grabbing the maps (or any other screen content, for that matter . at least anything that isn’t rights-protected).
If you have OneNote installed, press WindowsKey+S to initiate a snapshot, just like the Windows Snipping Tool. OneNote 2007 snaps the selected area of the screen into an unfiled note, and you can copy/paste the content from there to whatever application you like.
OneNote 2010 – which will be included with all versions of Office 2010 when it’s realeased later this year – even has the option of just copying the content to clipboard right away, rather than putting it into a OneNote file first.
OneNote is a great app which has a devoted set of followers out there – many Heart it, apparently.
Following the price cut on the desperately-in-need-of-renaming BPOS services recently, I’ve been talking with a few people about the where the tipping point might be for running Exchange in house vs using some form of hosted provision.
![Low_Cloud[1]](http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/photos/Low_Cloud.jpg "Low_Cloud[1]")
There are plenty of reasons why a hosted offering makes sense. More and more end-users are away from the office (using web access, mobile devices or VPN-less connectivity such as “Outlook Anywhere” that’s been part of Outlook for the last 6 years), and as the user end-point is increasingly mobile, it starts to matter a lot less where the server end is.
In the first 3 versions of Exchange (4.0, 5.0 and 5.5, released in 1997 and 1998), the accepted rule was that servers would be placed in the same location as clumps of users (say, if you have more than 30 users in a remote office and anything other than a great WAN connection, you’d drop an Exchange server on-site).
Since the client and server maintained a constant connection with each other (using MAPI over RPC, if you’re interested), and since wide area networks for most companies were in the few hundred kilobits between sites, the default was pretty much that servers tended to be in the same physical location as the users.
As network capacity improved (and costs fell), combined with server capability improvements (and price reductions, and technology like Outlook cached mode and the shift to using web access as an alternative), it became more feasible for organisations to centralise and consolidate Exchange into one or a few physical locations – such as Microsoft famously did, by moving from many locations in Exchange 2000 to just 3 in Exchange 2003.
So, the position we’re now at is, it pretty much doesn’t matter to an end user whether they’re connecting over a company wide-area network to a remote Exchange server, or if they’re connecting over the internet to one that sits in someone else’s datacenter.
If you’re an organisation with a few hundred users, then you probably don’t have a dedicated Exchange administrator who does nothing but feed and water the email system. Moving to an online hosted model such as Microsoft Online or one of the many “Hosted Exchange” partners who offer a more tailored service, could mean a significantly lower cost of operations when measured over the next few years.
Since Hosted Exchange providers and Microsoft Online will both move towards Exchange 2010 in the near future, it’s something that every current Exchange user should consider – is it time to consider moving some or all of your estate to a hosted environment, or you do have specific requirements around backup retention or data control, that you absolutely need to have your own servers on your own soil? If the latter, then maybe “cloud” based email isn’t for you, but Exchange 2010 “on-premise” would be the right choice.
As part of this discussion, of course, there’s the question of whether all of one or all of the other is the correct approach – a blended model could be the ideal, where some users are on-premise and others (maybe the less demanding) are hosted in the cloud.
Well hello again; it’s been a while.
Normal service should now infrequently resume.
I thought I’d update the instructions of a previous post, after I was showing someone how to use my old “Contacts updater” application to make all their Outlook contact phone numbers be E.164 compliant.
Now the little app I reference is an Outlook custom form, meaning it gets installed into the Exchange mailbox folder, rather than some client-side Add-in to Outlook. Custom Forms have been available since the days of the Exchange 4.0 client and later Outlook, as the installed forms show up an item on the “Action” menu within the view of the folder.
Now that Outlook 2010 has adopted the Fluent UI (aka the “Ribbon”), things have moved somewhat…
Just like the early days of Office 2007, the initial response from some users might be to get annoyed that things are in a different place, but in most cases, it’s a great improvement.
Since custom forms in Outlook have largely faded into the sunset, this particular one gets a bit more obscure… it’s a question of going to “New Items” within the folder, then selecting the “Custom Forms” pop-out (only available when you actually have some custom forms installed in that folder), and any forms installed will be presented there.
The instructions for the install of the custom form above are pretty much the same on Outlook 2010, except that instead of going to Tools | Options | Other | Advanced to get to the custom forms management, go to “Office button” | Options | Advanced.
The Office 2010 announcement a couple of weeks ago, (publicly) lifted the lid on the Office Web Applications, either as a set of web-based Office apps that a customer could host on their own metal (and expose to the outside world, perhaps), or as something that you’d be able to get online from others. Microsoft’s own “Office Live” workspaces will use Office WebApps, for example.
![logo_microsoft_office2010[1]](https://msdnshared.blob.core.windows.net/media/TNBlogsFS/BlogFileStorage/blogs_technet/ewan/WindowsLiveWriter/OfficeWebAppscomplementnotreplaceOffice_A795/logo_microsoft_office2010%5B1%5D_2.jpg "logo_microsoft_office2010[1]"){kind=logo}
It’s easy to think that moving to an online-based set of productivity applications would be an either/or decision – like today, you could choose to do either Office (as a client side set of apps) OR Google docs (as an online variant).
Maybe Office WebApps will blur that distinction a good bit. As an illustration, I was in an interesting talk last week, where the speaker asked:
Who in here uses Outlook Web Access?
(everyone’s hand goes up – well it was a Microsoft audience, so no surprises there)
OK, who now uses Outlook *less* because they also use OWA?
Literally, not a single hand went up.
So, for business use, you could think of Office WebApps as a way of interacting with the same documents, the same data, that you would if you were inside your company and using Office applications on a PC, but instead you’re at home or you’re at someone else’s machine, or maybe you just want to share your document with someone from outside the company. WebApps are promised with every version of Office, too, as is OneNote – finally making OneNote available to everyone, not just Professional or Student users.
More info on the Office Web Applications blog.
I’ve been beta testing Office 2007 SP2 since the beginning of the year, and it’s been great – the single biggest reason to use it is the myriad improvements made to Outlook, in terms of stability & performance (particularly relating to search and to startup & closedown).
From the summary of what’s new, check out:
The data file ‘file name‘ was not closed properly. This file is being checked for problems.
For more information about these improvements and details about other Outlook fixes, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
968774 Outlook 2007 improvements in the 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 2
Nearly a year ago, I wrote about Thread Compressor on here – it’s an add-in to Outlook which removes unnecessary emails, on the assumption that most people reply to mail and leave the original intact, so you could keep the last mail in each branch of a thread, and remove all the others.
![TC[1]](https://msdnshared.blob.core.windows.net/media/TNBlogsFS/BlogFileStorage/blogs_technet/ewan/WindowsLiveWriter/OutlookThreadCompressordownloadnowavaila_CCE0/TC%5B1%5D_2.jpg "TC[1]")
Way back when I was still developing TC, I tried to get it included on the Office Downloads section of Microsoft.com, but our legal department was (with some justification) very nervous about us offering a download which would go through the end user’s mailbox like a dose of salts, deleting stuff. So it stayed (more or less) an internal tool: I even started developing a “version 5” with a much groovier UI and some extra features.
Included in the v5 beta (which is a real pain to install nowadays – the previous v4.2.030 version has nearly the same feature set and is a lot more self contained), was a piece of logic which captured stats on TC usage and emailed them back to me.
Since many people at MS are still running that beta (it’s a long story, but the source code went south so it’ll never get out of “beta” state), I still get maybe 20-30 statistics mails a day…
Since August 2003 when the first statistics email arrived – from me, kind-of naturally – until 24th April 2007 (when I last did an analysis of the stats), TC v5 beta had scanned over 400m email messsages and had compressed over 30m, worth nearly half a terabyte of email data.
To the reader, the spoils
Well, I finally decided – in an “ask forgiveness rather than permission” move – to make the last complete and stable version available for download.
![TC4[1]](https://msdnshared.blob.core.windows.net/media/TNBlogsFS/BlogFileStorage/blogs_technet/ewan/WindowsLiveWriter/OutlookThreadCompressordownloadnowavaila_CCE0/TC4%5B1%5D_2.jpg "TC4[1]")
It’s not particularly elegant looking by modern standards (given that most of it was written 7 years ago in VB6) but it does work, even on Windows 7 (x86 and x64) and Office 2007. Basically, anything post-Office 2000/Windows 2000 should be OK.
A reader called Mark Ruggles emailed me the other day and said:
“It is fantastic and it works like a champ in Outlook 2007. I turned it loose on my Inbox and my archive and I deleted 103Mb of redundant data. I sent it out to some of my colleagues and my manager used it cutting his archives down by 2Gb.
…
This is the coolest utility I’ve found in a long time.”
So, thanks to Mark’s comment, I’ve now registered www.threadcompressor.co.uk and posted install instructions and a download file up there.